1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to resource management. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to water management.
2. Background Information
Shale production in recent years has fundamentally reshaped the onshore oil and gas industry and operating models. Operational efficiency is now an imperative for exploration and production (E&P) of new oilfield wells. An oilfield well as used herein refers to a well that has or is capable of producing hydrocarbons as its primary commercial product. Efficient water management has become a critical component of new operating models, driven in part by large volumes of water required for well completions as well as large volumes of flow-back and produced water that are generated over the productive life of an oilfield well. Water-related costs have become a material source of well capital expenditures, and may be on the order of 10-30% of capital expenditures as well as the largest single source of well operating expenditures. While water costs have risen substantially, these costs are often not visible to an operator as water expenditures are seldom grouped comprehensively into a single cost category, but rather spread over drilling, completions, and production budgets. Most operators are not aware of how much is spent on water related costs over the lifecycle of an oilfield well or how oilfield well water may vary across different geographies, well operation practices or well types.
While the role of water in oil and gas operations has risen substantially, the information tools and processes used by most operators to manage decisions relating to water have not. Most exploration and production companies manage water related data in spreadsheets, and important decisions are often made using out of date, fragmented and incomplete data-sets.
As a result of the lack of data management, decisions with significant financial implications are sometimes made using general rules of thumb based on long-held assumptions. Immature processes and tools are sometimes used due in part to the fact that shale development is relatively new in the oil drilling industry. Few exploration and production companies have experience managing shale wells for more than a decade. Rather, shale well developers have focused in the early days on identifying and acquiring good acreage, and then deploying assets in the field as quickly as possible to realize the opportunity. Cost and efficiency considerations have been secondary to this prime objective. This is common in early stages of new markets or a new production method enabled by a fundamental technology shift, such as hydraulic fracturing. However, shale production is becoming a more mature industry, and operational efficiencies are increasingly sought.
As a result of the industry maturation, exploration and production company operators have to ask questions relating to exploration and development such as:                How does water availability, quality and cost compare to the expected economic benefits of extraction?        How much water is needed for a drilling plan?        Where is water sourced from, how much water is available, and what is the quality of available water?        How much water will be produced in a drilling plan, where will the water be produced, when will the water be produced, and what will be the quality of water and how will the quality change over time?        What options are there for flow-back and produced water management?        Where are water disposal assets located, how far are water disposal assets from hydrocarbon wells, and what is the utilization capacity of the water disposal assets?        What is the cost of treatment per barrel given produced water qualities?        
Also as a result of industry maturation, oilfield service providers have to ask questions such as:                When considering exploration, where is a new well likely to be drilled? What types of flow-back and water production are expected?        When considering exploration, where should investments in new water management assets and infrastructure go?        When considering production, where are treatment and disposal assets in relation to the provider's assets?        When considering production, what is the accessible disposal and treatment capacity within?        When considering production, what qualities of water are being produced per month and at what volumes? How will this change over time?        When considering production, under what circumstances is it economical to treat versus dispose of flow-back and produced water?        When considering production, how can utilization be better balanced across water-related assets in a region?        When considering production, what water to hydrocarbon production relationships are to be expected depending on expected hydrocarbon production metrics (volume, type, geology etc.)?        
To answer these questions effectively requires timely access to good data and robust data analysis. In the context of oilfield water management and the larger water marketplace, this presents a significant challenge. For example, water may be mispriced when information is hard to acquire, or when information provided by different parties is not correlated. A lack of transparency is a key reason behind pricing inefficiency in the market. There is a wealth of information in the public domain. Until now, the cost of acquiring information even when available in the public domain has been prohibitive. Additionally, a large number of variables must be collected in order to provide the essential information to describe a water asset. Each oilfield asset can have hundreds or even thousands of relevant data-points. These data points need to be captured, structured into a common data model, and mined, in order to be made useful, e.g., by way of estimating and predicting water demand (usage) and water production as well as managing water operations, for an exploration and production company. Moreover, there are many different public sources of water related asset data, and these data sets are constantly changing with thousands of new wells being drilled per month. This is analogous to putting together a large puzzle while the pieces of the puzzle are changing in real time.